elkit in wonderland

Shakin' It, Shakin' It, Baby, Shakin' It, Shakin' It, Shake

The Great Southern California ShakeOut is coming: At 10 a.m. on November 13, join millions of Southern Californians in the ShakeOut Drill, the largest earthquake preparedness activity in U.S. history!

I'll just watch from my Northern California perch. (I feel left out, actually. Why don't we get to join in the fun? Pout!)

Don't Give Me No Hand-Me-Down World

Tomorrow is Global Handwashing Day:

Hand Washing Day: Where health care is lacking, a simple means of prevention is washing hands. As part of the United Nations’ International Year of Sanitation, October 15 has been declared the first Global Handwashing Day. Events sponsored by UNICEF on five continents are aimed at having some 200 million people, mostly children, wash their hands with soap. Statistics put out by the organization back up what your mother probably always told you: Washing hands at two key moments during the day –- before eating or after using the toilet — can reduce diarrhea rates among children under five by almost 50 percent and respiratory infections by 23 percent.

Diarrhea and pneumonia together kill nearly 3.5 million children each year. Yet the organization says global hand washing rates at those critical moments range from zero to 34 percent.

It's The End Of The World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

From Yahoo! News: CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang.

[T]he most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

The machine at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, promises scientists a closer look at the makeup of matter, filling in gaps in knowledge or possibly reshaping theories.

The first beams of protons will be fired around the 17-mile tunnel to test the controlling strength of the world's largest superconducting magnets. It will still be about a month before beams traveling in opposite directions are brought together in collisions that some skeptics fear could create micro "black holes" and endanger the planet.

Well. I guess we'll find out soon if there's cause to be concerned.

Is A Very Very Very Fine House

I want one of these Enertia Houses that cools and heats itself. Why isn't everybody building houses like this?

Life on Mars

Looking for Monterey Canyon maps a few weeks ago to get some background on my NaNoWriMo retelling of The Little Mermaid, I came across this fascinating news: Project will cable up ocean floor.

Electricians prefer to keep power cords dry as a rule. But in Monterey, California, scientists and engineers are hopeful that immersing electrical cable off the coast will profoundly improve how the oceans are studied.

This week [note: this was published in March 2007], a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) will lay 52km (32 miles) of electrical cable from a research station on shore to a shelf 900m (3,000ft) below the sea's surface.

The thick cable will send power to, and return data from, a variety of research instruments - to be added later this year - that will sit on Smooth Ridge, a plateau at the edge of Monterey Canyon, the largest and deepest submarine canyon off the continental West Coast.

And look, isn't this MBARI map fantastic? I don't dive (heck, I don't even swim well), but the Monterey Canyon fascinates me to no end.

I'll Be Your Gay Friend

More linkage ... been reading a lot on these intarwebs. Here are two interesting, and somewhat related, tidbits:

1. On Gay sheep

2.1. on an ex-gay shepherd
2.2. more on the completely heterosexual Ted Haggard
2.3. even more surprising answers on de-gayification
2.4. and American Voices on Haggard scared straight

Who Wants To Live Forever?

red wine pour
Originally uploaded by Skip Hansen.

Fortune Magazine asks "Can red wine help you live forever?", a question I am compelled to answer with Queen: Who Wants To Live Forever?

I don't. And of course the startup and technology they're discussing is very careful to state they are not looking at prolonging life - they're interested in keeping people healthier longer.

Resveratrol is the ingredient in red wine that made headlines in November when scientists demonstrated that it kept overfed mice from gaining weight, turned them into the equivalent of Olympic marathoners, and seemed to slow down their aging process.

Whatever their findings, I drink to that! I like red wine, and don't really need an excuse to imbibe. But it's always nice to have an extra anecdote to defend your preferences.

Weird Science

Yes, really! More Pravda. [[[Pravda, people, Pravda! Not Prada. Silly ... ]]] I will make it my mission this week to read at least one Pravda article every day. In the science section: Every fifth man has women's brains.

Women could not think properly because of their emotions

Scientists discovered that every fifth male has "female brains." The owner of such brains does not necessarily look like a gay man. Vice versa, he can be a rather brutal-looking macho. A man with women's brains will differ from other men for his passion for women's occupations.

A man can always use the "women's logic" argument in a dispute with a woman. The argument finishes the dispute immediately, and the female opponent will not be able to win it, no matter what she will try to say in her own defense. It was generally believed that the male way of thinking was much more rational: women could not think properly because of their emotions. Recent scientific discoveries reject the connection between sex and the thinking. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge says not all men possess the male quality of thinking about systems. Because of such quality men know how to read maps, make plans and lists. On the other hand, not all women are capable of feeling.

Nightswimming Deserves A Quiet Night

It's been proven now that Swimming in syrup is as easy as water:

".. while it might sound like a trivial question, the principle is actually fundamental. Isaac Newton and his contemporary Christiaan Huygens argued the toss over it back in the 17th century while Newton was writing his Principia Mathematica, which sets out many of the laws of physics. Newton thought that an object's speed through a fluid would depend on its viscosity, whereas Huygens thought it would not. In the end, Newton included both versions in his text.

Hamstrung by their lack of access to guar gum or competitive swimmers, Newton's and Huygens' work was mainly theoretical. Cussler's demonstration shows that Huygens was right, at least for human-sized projectiles."

[From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley]

Take Me Home, Take Me Home, I Know Another Place To Be

Folding Proteins At Home - doesn't that sound like the latest "make millions of $$$$ working from home" scam? And rather tedious? Folding proteins ... I can't even tie a knot into a cherry stem. No way I could fold proteins.

Turns out I wouldn't have to do it myself: "As part of a groundbreaking distributed computing experiment, Johnson and half a million other people are donating their spare computer capacity so Stanford can remotely simulate protein folding, an essential biochemical process that controls vital body functions.

The project, called Folding@home, represents a sort of ad hoc democracy because anyone with an Internet connection can join. Users simply download an application that runs protein-folding simulations on their desktop computers when the systems are idle."